Has HDFS joined MapReduce in the emerging “legacy Hadoop project” category, continuing the swap-out of components that formerly answered the question “what is Hadoop?” Stores for data were certainly a focus at Strata/Hadoop World in NY, O’Reilly’s well-run, well-attended, and always impactful fall event. The limitations of HDFS, including its append-only nature, have become inconvenient enough to push the community to “invent” something DBMS vendors like Oracle did decades ago: a bypass. After some pre-event leaks about its arrival, Cloudera chose its Strata keynote to announce Kudu, a new columnstore written in C++, bypassing HDFS entirely. Kudu will use an Apache license and will be submitted to the Apache process at some undetermined future time.

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